- Hey Bakers, John Kanell from Preppy Kitchen here.
Today we're making this ridiculous strawberry pie.
It is easy as pie, full of fresh strawberries,
has a little hint of lemon, it's sitting in this
flaky butter crust, and it's basically
summer in a pie.
Let's get started!
For this recipe, I'm using my perfect pie crust.
It's all butter, really crispy, flaky, and
it bakes up wonderfully every single time.
I have all my tips and tricks in a blog post
so you can click over there, it's the link in the bio
and if you wanna see all the tips and tricks in a video,
click up over here for my butter pie crust.
All right, I have tented it and here's the reveal:
Look at that.
Still pretty warm, but you can see baked up
nice and golden brown, really perfectly flaky,
and so hot.
Oh my gosh.
Whoo!
Removing it, there we go.
It'll cool much faster outside of the pie crust.
Don't do that unless you're experienced and
confident you won't break things.
We're gonna set this aside to cool.
Now for the filling!
That was easy.
Starting off with the zest of one lemon,
I really like to wake up the strawberry flavor
with a bit of citrus, so go ahead and get the zest
off of a lemon before you juice it,
it's so much easier that way.
I'm gonna put this in my little bowl
and now, let's get to juicing.
I want a quarter of a cup of lemon juice in this recipe.
And I'm not gonna live on the edge and
pick seeds out, strain it.
So depending on the size of your lemons,
it's either gonna be like two lemons to one and a half.
That's great, that's a quarter of a cup.
Set this aside and let's hull our strawberries.
I have two pounds of washed strawberries over here.
Do you love how I said zest the lemon before cutting it
and then I preceded to not use my zested lemon?
It's okay.
Remove the cap.
If you have those strawberries that are like
super ripe, falling apart, maybe not even the
prettiest strawberries, that's great for this recipe.
You can reserve the really pretty strawberries
for the top of the pie and use all those delicious,
kind of almost over ripe strawberries for the filling.
That's a nice strawberry, you can always tell when
they're actually red inside, sometimes at the
grocery store, especially if it's off season,
you'll see these beautiful red strawberries
and on the inside when you cut them open, they're
like pure white and flavorless.
It's very disappointing.
Separating my strawberries into the pretty ones
and the ugly ones.
The ugly ones are gonna get mashed up into the
filling and the pretty ones will be arranged
on the pie, in a careless but artful manner.
Okay, so before we deal with the strawberries,
let's get our filling solution finished.
To my quarter cup of lemon juice and, you know,
zest of a lemon, I'm gonna add half a cup of water,
three tablespoons, or thirty grams, of cornstarch.
I hate- hate feeling this stuff, it like sends shivers
down my spine, but you're so useful
as a thickening agent, so.
I'm gonna use my giant balloon whisk and let's mix this up
so it is a nice slurry instead of a
giant lump of cornstarch in a citrus solution.
We're gonna set this aside and right now we'll
make a reduction of strawberries with my
almost one pound of strawberries.
I'm adding half of my hulled strawberries
right into a sauce pot.
Three quarters of a cup of granulated sugar.
I'm actual gonna zest just a little bit more lemon.
Right, so just muddle those strawberries up.
You can do this over heat as well, but I like
getting it started before the burner's on
'cause I don't wanna singe my hand.
Strawberries are all started, let's set them over
a medium heat and get to reducing.
If you want, you can mash them up a bit after
you put them on the heat, but they're kinda
gonna reduce on they're own, just come back and stir
them around every once in a while.
After about four to five minutes, you can reduce
the heat to like medium low and just let them simmer
for a while.
They'll need at least ten minutes and you want
them to reduce by about half.
Strawberries are so full of water that you need
to get rid of that for your pie to not just
be like a watery mess.
So as those strawberries start breaking down,
you can see they're releasing a ton of water and
we just want to let that slowly reduce to about
50%, give it some time, don't try and rush it
by turning the heat up.
That's not gonna work and you'll burn the strawberries.
When it's reduced and thickened up, you know
it's ready for the next step.
So my mixture is reduced, you know, about 30% of the way,
I'm gonna add in my cornstarch lemon mixture
because now it's time to get serious about thickening.
Gonna bring that heat back up to like a medium high
then just whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk.
This should thicken up pretty quickly, but even
after it thickens up we're gonna cook it
for like another six or seven minutes.
Okay, so this is all thickened up right now,
washed out my pie tin, my glass pie crust container?
I don't know.
Anyways, and this is all cool now, as well.
Smells so good!
I can't even tell you.
Place that back in there.
I'm just holding it-
I'm jus placing the pie crust back in the container
so when we cut it it'll be nice and supported and
nothing happens in the fridge.
Okay, now for the fun part, just start arranging those
wonderful, beautiful pieces of strawberry
right in your pie crust.
And this, by the way, is a nine and a half inch pie crust
so it's a pretty big one.
Right, now we can pour-
be careful, because things are hot.
Smooth that out.
And we're gonna shake and jiggle this so it all,
all gets in there.
And then you can finish it off by placing
some strawberries right on top.
If you're gonna top your pie with whipped cream
or something else, this is totally like a redundant
step, I just wanted to add a couple pretty
strawberries to the top just for the sake of,
you know, maybe just a nice cover,
thumbnail you'll click on,
to be honest.
I'm gonna thin out the remaining filling with
a drop of orange liqueur just to thin it out
and because it's delicious.
So just, get that thinned out and just brush,
brush, brush, brush.
I wanna give you some pro tips for this recipe now.
If you notice you're strawberries are not super sweet,
add in an extra quarter cup of sugar, that'll
balance things out and if you do not like lemon,
like this is almost a strawberry-lemonade pie,
it has a lot of zing, you can just skip the lemon juice
and just sub out for a quarter cup of water,
skip lemon zest, as well, if you're not a lemon fan.
Strawberries are all brushed, this looks gorgeous to me!
This screams summer and says, "Where is my gigantic
mound of whipped cream to eat with this?"
Mouth is watering.
We're gonna put this into the fridge for, at least,
a few hours, you wanna it to set up nicely so when
you cut it, it cuts up nice and firm.
You can even make this the night before and it'll be great.
Let's make some whipped cream and then serve it up.
So let's add in two cups of heavy whipping cream.
For the two cups, we're adding in a quarter cup of
confectioners sugar.
Whip that up along with:
a splash of vanilla.
Keep an eye on this, if you let it go to far it
will curdle and turn kinda like cheesy and not
attractive as it should be.
Can you imagine doing that by hand?
My goodness, okay, so it's whipped up
and that's just how we want it.
It's nice and thick.
Behind the scenes, I mixed up a little bit of strawberry
jam and a couple drops of orange liqueur,
heat it up in the microwave, and I'm just brushing
it onto the strawberries to
turn them into glistening jewels.
I've been waiting to do this for so long,
I had to let it set for a few hours so I could
photograph it, but
look at this!
Um, excuse me, what?
That is so good!
It's like just eating fresh strawberries suspended
in a strawberry reduction with a little bit
of whipped cream, and a little bit of crispy
pastry, it's perfect.
If you like this recipe, check out my classic
French fruit tart, it is just delicious,
full of fresh fruit and you are gonna love it!
Or check out my chocolate eclairs, they are light,
chocolaty, crispy, gooey, amazing.
If you like my videos, don't forget to hit
that like button and subscribe and I'll see you soon!